By now, I have tested many Linux distros. But I had yet to come across any distro that actually did better in VMware then on actual hardware. Until now.

While there are many netbooks on the market from a variety of different vendors, for the most part they are composed of the same hardware. When it comes to Dell with their popular Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, they happen to be using Ubuntu but with a few modifications.

The Google Android Developers have announced the release of an "early look" of the Software Development Kit (SDK) for Android version 1.5. The new SDK provides a preview of the cupcake branch of the open source mobile platform and is based on the 2.6.27 Linux kernel.

Automatic Command-line Ripper (acripper) is a free opensource tool for ripping and encoding CD tracks on the fly. It also tries to get the CD information from feeddb.org, a CDDB website and writes it to the encoded files.

Arora is a simple cross platform web browser. Currently Arora is a very basic browser whose feature list includes things like "History" and "Bookmarks". When using Qt 4.4 Arora does not have support for netscape plugins, but if you use qt-snapshot then it will work. But it is small, less than 10,000 lines of code, very fast, lean, mean and loads of fun to hack on.

I have always wanted a good quality audio player that works well with Linux and plays Ogg Vorbis files. Even though the Sansa Clip was originally released in 2007, I somehow missed it.

Most Gnome users probably use Evolution, the default PIM, to manage their tasks and ToDo lists. However, if you are like me, who is not a user of Evolution and are looking for a native standalone ToDo list app for your Linux machine, here are 5.

Recently, I purchased a Linux-based EeePC. I bought it for easy “packing” so I could have the means to write in serious “go mode.” It worked well but there was something that bothered me a bit - the pre-installed OS.